Digweed’s weekend trip to Berlin

You really have to dig out the big grey tomes of Berlin’s collective clubbing memory to get to know when John Digweed was crossing the doorstep of Germany’s capital last time. To many people there is only his appearance along Sasha (on the occasion of the Nothern Exposure tour) coming to mind, which took place about 12 years ago. After such a long time his current Bedrock Eleven tour brought the British top DJ finally to Berlin again, to delight the audience of the Weekend club.

Berlin on a Thursday in February. The city is stuck in winter. Russian leather coat and gloves are protecting from wet cold when walking tottery over slippery ice crusted pavement towards former Haus des Reisens. The building is not only element of the ensemble framing Berlin’s Alexanderplatz, it is also an inherent part of the city’s history of clubbing as it’s been venue for the famous No Ufos club Sternradio, nowadays Centrum located on the ground. Bumping into the big names of electronic music is meanwhile more likely to happen when being on twelfth, fifteenth or top floor – all of them are playground for the Weekend club.

Having been catapulted into twelfth floor short after 12 o’clock in the night, people were already embraced by first feet warming grooves. BPitch Control’s Zander VT were framing the show of the DJ legend originating from Hastings (UK). In the beginning it’s been about gentle deep house rhythms as warm-up, but after John they were pushing the pace into spheres of pumping tech house and proper techno. From the very first second the international audience was eager on having a blast, hence Zander VT had no big effort to drag the people onto the dance floor. It’s good to see that Berlinale’s cineastes cannot only be fascinated by film making and movies, and the one or other real Berliner was part of the night as well, if the following Friday could have been taken off.

At 2:00 John took over the steering and let the cane out of the bag; giving the young audience exactly what it was begging for: pumping bass, accompanied with the typical harmonies and themes Bedrock’s label head is worldwide worshipped for. Digweed by the way confirmed that he didn’t play in Berlin for about 12 years now. Like last year at the SQ club in Poznan the Brit let dim out the lights. Even a cigarette lighter was able to double the amount of available light. Hence freehand photos taken at an exposure time of ~1/5s and aperture 1.4 can’t be 100% sharp. At about 5:00 o’clock the Berliners frenetically bid their farewell and the Zander VT boys took over again. Hopefully it doesn’t take another 12 years until John will come back to Berlin again…